Carlos Brody, Ph.D.

Carlos Brody is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He completed his Ph.D. in 1997, in computation and neural systems with John Hopfield at the California Institute of Technology. Starting in 2001, he led a computational neuroscience group as an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Inspired by the efforts that Zachary Mainen’s and Anthony Zador’s experimental groups at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory were making in developing highly controlled behaviors for rats, Brody added experimental approaches to his research portfolio. His focus is on novel quantitative behaviors that allow exploring high-level cognitive questions using powerful emerging tools for studying neural mechanisms in rats. Brody’s group now uses rats to investigate the neural bases of decision making, working memory and executive control using a combination of high-throughput semiautomated behavior as well as computational, electrophysiological, pharmacological and optogenetic methods. Brody moved to Princeton University in 2006, and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator since 2008.